“Oh, I’ve been trying to get this messal started for a few days,” Moyra said. “Just ask Suur Asquin, she’ll tell you what a pest I’ve made of myself. You don’t really think something like this could be thrown together by a bunch of hierarchs passing notes around during Inbrase, do you?”

“Grandsuur Moyra,” Arsibalt began, “if it wasn’t this morning’s Laboratorium results that brought this messal into being, what was it?”

“Well, if you weren’t too busy flirting with these lovely suurs and horsing around in the kitchen, you might have heard me earlier, speaking of being a meta-Lorite.”

“Or a Plurality of Worlds Lorite,” I said.

“Ah, so you were paying attention!”

“I thought it was just an icebreaker.”

“Who was their Evenedric, Fraa Arsibalt?”

“I beg your pardon?” Arsibalt was fascinated by the question, but soon had his hands full as Suur Tris dumped a huge greasy platter into his arms.

“Fraa Tavener, who was the Saunt Hemn on the planet of Quator? Tris, who was the Lady Baritoe of Antarct? Fraa Orhan, do they worship a God on Pangee, and is it the same as the God of the Matarrhites?”

“It must be, Grandsuur Moyra!” Orhan exclaimed, and made a gesture with his hand (I had decided he had to be male) that I’d seen before. Some kind of Deolater superstition.

“Fraa Erasmas, who discovered Halikaarn’s Diagonal on the world of Diasp?”

“Because obviously they did think such thoughts, you’re saying…” Arsibalt said.

“They must have done, to build that ship!” said Barb.

“Your minds are so much fresher, more agile than some of those who sit in that messallan,” Moyra said. “I thought you might have ideas.”

Suur Tris turned around and asked, “Are you saying that there would be one-to-one-correspondences between our Saunts and theirs? Like the same mind shared across multiple worlds?”

“I’m asking you,” Moyra said.

I had nothing to say, being stricken with the all-too-familiar feeling of unease that came over me, lately, when conversations began to wander down this path. The last words Orolo had spoken to me, a few minutes before he’d died, had been a warning that the Thousanders knew about this stuff, and had been developing a praxis around it: in effect, that the legends of the Incanters were based in fact. And perhaps I’d fallen back into my old habit of worrying too much; but it seemed to me, now, that every conversation I was part of came dangerously close to this topic.

Arsibalt, unburdened by such cares, felt ready to have a go. He heaved the washed platter into a drying rack, wiped his hands on his bolt, and squared off. “Well. Any such hypothesis would have to be grounded in some account of why different minds in different worldtracks would think similar things. One could always look to a religious explanation,” he went on, with a glance at Orhan, “but other than that…well…”

“You needn’t be reticent about your belief in the HTW—remember who you’re talking to! I’ve seen it all!”

“Yes, Grandsuur Moyra,” Arsibalt said, with a dip of the head.

“How might the knowledge propagate from a common Theoric World—I won’t call it Hylaean, since presumably there was no person named Hylaea on Quator—to the minds of different Saunts in different worlds? And is it still going on at this moment—between us, and them?” Moyra had been edging toward the back door as she tossed these mind bombs into the kitchen, and now almost collided with Emman Beldo, fresh in from escorting his doyn home.

“Well, it sounds as though the messal will discuss that tomorrow,” I pointed out.

“Why wait? Don’t be complacent!” Moyra shot back as she was storming out into the night. Karvall threw down a towel and scurried after her, drawing her bolt up over her head. Emman politely got out of her way, then swiveled to watch Karvall until there was nothing left to see. When he turned back around, he got a sponge in the face from Suur Tris.

“You can’t just have these tracks wandering around in Hemn space—” said Emman.

“The way we’re wandering around in the dark,” I proposed. For we were attempting to find a suitable Lucub.

“With no rhyme or reason. Can you?”

“You mean the worldtracks? The Narratives?”

“I guess so—what is up with that, by the way?”

It was a vague question but I could tell what was on his mind.

“You mean, Fraa Jad’s use of the word Narrative?”

“Yeah. That’s going to be a hard one to sell to—”

“The Panjandrums?”

“Is that what you call people like my doyn?”

“Some of us.”

“Well, they’re pretty hardheaded. Don’t go in for anything highfalutin.”

“Well, let me see if I can come up with an example,” I said. “Remember what Arsibalt said? The block of ice buried in the star?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “There is a point in Hemn space that represents a cosmos that includes even that.”

“The configuration of the cosmos encoded in that point,” I said, “includes—along with all the stars and planets, the birds and the bees, the books and the speelies and everything else—one star that happens to have a big chunk of ice in the middle of it. That point, remember, is just a long string of numbers—coordinates in the space. No more or less real than any other possible string of numbers.”

“Its realness—or unrealness in this case—has to grow out of some other consideration,” Emman tried.

“You got it. And in this case, it is that the situation being described is so damned ridiculous.”

“How could it ever happen, to begin with?” Emman demanded, getting into the spirit.

“Happen. That’s the key word,” I said, wishing I could explain this as confidently as Orolo. “What does it mean for something to happen?” That sounded pretty lame. “It’s not just this situation—this isolated point in configuration space—that springs into being for a moment and then vanishes. It’s not like you have a normal star, and then suddenly for one tick of the cosmic clock a block of ice materializes in the middle of it, and then, next tick, poof! It’s gone without a trace.”

“But it could happen, couldn’t it, if you had a Hemn Space teleporter?”

“Mm, that’s a useful thought experiment,” I said. “You’re thinking of a gadget from one of Moyra’s novels. A magic booth where you could dial in any point in Hemn space, realize it, and then jump to another.”

“Yeah. Regardless of the laws of theorics or whatever. Then you could make the ice block materialize. But then it would melt.”

“It would melt,” I corrected him, “if you let natural law take over from that point. But you could preserve it by making your Hemn Space teleporter jump to another point encoding the same cosmos, an instant later, but with the block of ice still included.”

“Okay, I get it—but normally it would melt.”

“So, Emman, the question is: what means ‘normally’? Another way of putting it: if you look at the series of points you’d have to string together with your Hemn Space teleporter in order to see, outside the windows of the booth, a cosmos with a block of ice persisting in the middle of a star, how different would that series of points have to be from one that was a proper worldtrack?”

“Meaning, a worldtrack where natural laws were respected?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know.”

We laughed. “Well,” I said, “I’m now starting to understand some of what Orolo was saying to me about Saunt Evenedric. Evenedric studied datonomy—an outgrowth of Sconic philosophy—which means, what is given to us, what we observe. In the end, that’s all we have to work with.”

“I’ll bite,” Emman said, “what do we observe?”

“Not just world points that are coherent,” I said, “so, no ice blocks in stars—but coherent series of such points: a worldtrack that could have happened.”